I saw a favorite old T.V. show of mine today. An original Twilight
Zone episode called "The Shelter". For those of you who have never
seen it, this story is about neighbors who, during a dinner party,
discover that a nuclear attack is occurring. The main character, a
doctor, moves his family to their fallout shelter, the rest scatter to
their homes in panic, only to return and demand a place for themselves
and their families, because they have no shelters of their own. The
Doctor explains that there is only room for three people, and that
they should have listened when he urged them to build their own
shelters. The neighbors beg, they plead, they offer to draw lots to
see which family should use the shelter, then they threaten and
eventually batter down the door. In the end the war never happens, the
attack was a false alarm, and the lesson was "To remain a
civilization, we must remain civilized."

I have always liked this story, but watching it today I realized how
it displayed our culture in microcosm. Confronted by a danger long
known to exist, too many of us ignore it, we reject its reality in the
apparent hope that ignoring it will make it go away. Whether the
threat is nuclear war, economic collapse, natural disaster, or an
emerging police state, people (especially Americans) reject the
admission if it's reality to their consciousness. When reality asserts
itself however, the impulse to survive drive's them to any extremity.

The mythological doctor in the story said as much "No, you didn't
listen when I told you. I told you to give up some of your cocktail
parties and baseball games for a few afternoons, but you wouldn't
listen. It would have been admitting the age we live in, and you
couldn't do that." The response? To transfer the blame for their own
inaction, into blame on the doctor for refusing to commit suicide on
their behalf. Sound familiar? Look at the examples of social security,
welfare, public education, and a thousand other programs, all of them
predicated on the belief that because people choose not to provide
certain things for themselves, they have a right to demand that others
supply them when needed.

The threat of terrorism was ignored in this country for more than
thirty years. Highjackings, bombings, shootings, these things failed
to excite any desire to defend ourselves, people just went on with
their lives oblivious to any threat to themselves. After all these
were just isolated events that happened to other people in other
places. Of course when the twin towers fell this changed, suddenly
everybody looked around and realized that trained, organized killers
had all of us in their sights. The response was to leap into the arms
of the statist's who proclaimed a willingness to protect them, if they
just give up a few of those silly constitutional rights.

In the story, the neighbors offered to draw lots, to decide by random
chance who will benefit from the doctor's preparations. Of course in
our society many people seem to think that this would be perfectly
acceptable. Do they not refer to the producers, the achievers in our
country as "The winners of life's lottery"? All around us there are
those who believe that good fortune falls from heaven, landing on the
head of any random stumble-bum who happens to be passing by. And why
shouldn't they? Do the teachers in our 'Schools' tell them of the
blood, sweat, and tears shed by men like Thomas Edison (or at least
the poor bastards who worked for him), Nikola Tesla, and John Moses
Browning? Hell, searching "Yahoo" for MY name will get more hits than
Tesla. The great men of industry are all just lucky, right? They were
just greedy, self-centered, egotistical, robber-barons. So it is only
right that we allow the universe to amend its error in choosing them
as winners instead of us, right?

The story is fiction, and was not meant as a reflection on society as
a whole, but it turns out to be a pretty good one. The best example of
that fact was not the voice of Rod Serling, reminding us of the need
to act as civilized beings, but rather before that, in the scene of
the neighbors bashing down the door of the shelter, preparing to drive
out the doctor and his family. Why is that so significant? Because by
breaking down the door they destroyed the very protection they sought.
Ironic, don't you think?